Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1617: Did Sabermetrics Break Baseball?

Episode Date: November 17, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley reflect on the fact that it took a former player to hire Kim Ng as MLB’s first woman general manager, follow up on the unwritten rules controversy surrounding Kyuji Fujikawa’s final out, and evaluate two recent statements by Scott Boras, then (24:07) bring on Baseball Prospectus’s Patrick Dubuque and FanGraphs’ […]

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Hello and welcome to episode 1617 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg. Hello. How are you doing? I'm doing all right.

How are you? Not bad. So we are devoting most of this episode to a discussion with our pals Patrick Dubuque of Baseball Perspectives and Dan Simborski of Fangraphs about the effect of sabermetrics both on the economics of the game and on the metagame and how the game looks on the field. We're just going to get into all of that

because Patrick wrote about it last week and the idea that maybe the game has been solved, that maybe in some ways sabermetrics has had a harmful effect. There's a lot of self-examination that goes on, I think, about whether early sabermetrics has had a harmful effect. There's a lot of self-examination that goes on, I think, about whether early sabermetrics should have considered some of the effects that it might have down the road. So we're going to talk about all of that. Before we do, I just wanted to read a quick excerpt from Joe Sheehan's newsletter entry on the hiring of Kim Ang by the Marlins, which we talked about last week. And Joe pointed out something that is sort of relevant to our discussion today. So he says, a baseball team

run by Kim Eng would have been unimaginable in an era when most baseball executives came from the playing ranks, whether major league or minor league. The biases in baseball weren't divided along the lines of man-woman, but rather did-didn't-you-play. Of course, I guess it was both. Doesn't have to be one or the other. But yes, he continues, it was only when that changed when Brian Cashman and Theo Epstein and Andrew Friedman built championship teams when the game came to be run not by former players but by the executive class that the door opened to allow women. When the key question was, did you play?

Aang never would have had a chance. Now the question is, can you think? And Aang steps in fully qualified. And I agree with that to an extent, but it also occurred to me as I was reading this that the person who hired Kim Eng was a former player. Brian Cashman hired her, of course, as an assistant GM, but it was not one of the sabermetrics types, one of the numbers types who would not have been in the game before, or some Wall Street person who came into baseball, or some former big business person or hedge fund type, because this is usually an ownership level decision. It was Derek Jeter or some combination of Derek Jeter and other

Marlins owners, which when you think about it, that makes the failure for any other team to hire Kimming or any other woman for decades, maybe even more glaring in the sense that if sabermetrics sort of opened the door for the non-traditional executive, you know, the non-player executives, then why did no one at any point in the past decades decide we should hire Kim Eng or we should hire another woman to be our GM until it took Derek Jeter to do it. It took one of the former players who in a past era of baseball would have been the one making those decisions to make this decision. Yeah, I don't want to unfairly oversimplify Joe's argument there. for a long time, Ben, that once you looked beyond the player pool, that you were necessarily going to at least consider candidates who did not have a playing background because, you know, as I've

said on the podcast before, like, ain't none of us nerds played baseball at a high level for the most part. But I think that it's a pretty, I think that that argument is fine in theory, but in practice, you know, Kim Ang was able to work at a high level in baseball for basically my entire lifetime before she was hired to be a general manager. So if analytics is opening the door for folks who are not, you know, cis men to have a leadership role in baseball, the pace is glacier. Right, yeah. And how many, I mean, like, this is going to be a little bit flippant in terms of my description, but like how many 32-year-old Ivy League white dudes have we seen step into a GM role? Right. two-year-old Ivy League white dudes have we seen step into a GM role in between when, you know,

front office orthodoxy became analytically focused to last week. So I think that the potential is there and that part is really exciting. And I don't want to discount that because when you require a playing background to be a senior person within baseball, you are, by definition, at least professional playing background, really restricting the pool of people who you can look at. And any move that opens that up to a broader cross-section of the population is to be lauded. But it is not enough on its own for that potential to exist. There has to be action behind it. And I think that in much the same way that we should kind of look skeptically at the league when it trots out a social media campaign, you know, saying anything is possible. Little

girls should dream big. It's like, well, okay, buddy, but like, right. As of this week, they should dream big. Like, what are we supposed to take from this? I think that sabermetricians should be careful to acknowledge the promise and also hold themselves accountable for the failure of that promise for such a long time. And I don't mean to pick on Joe when I say that because I think that this argument gets trotted out by a lot of people.

And I have made the argument that it's part of what was appealing to me about understanding baseball this way is that there was a, there was space for me in a way that there was not necessarily, but I can say as a person who like talks to folks who work for teams to, to think that this is an issue of, you know, former players see it one way and stat heads see it the other. There are a lot of different kinds of people who treat other folks with respect and, you know, come into their conversations with them

with a good faith expectation that they know what they're talking about. And there are plenty of, I mean, I'm going to do a swear. There are plenty of shitheads on both sides. So I think that, like, it's, we need to see concerted action over and over and to your point like it's not necessarily gonna come from the sabermetric community sometimes it's gonna be a former player who knows that person and can

testify to their character and competency and say yeah this is this is our person who should be running the marlins right so I think we should all maintain skeptical poses at all times, if only because we're less likely to be disappointed. Yeah, I saw Christina Carl make the same point. She tweeted last week, who was it who thought Sabermetrics could give his small budget team an edge? Ex-MLB player Billy Bean, who recognized I should hire Kim Eng as GM. Ex-MLB player Derek Jeter. Not the Ivy League guys, not the Wall Street guys. An imperfect observation, but one to ponder.

And yeah, it does sort of stand out to you that, you know, you might say that, yes, Kim Eng would have had an even harder time getting this job in an earlier era when only baseball players were allowed to run teams for the most part. But it was plenty hard in this era too. And when someone finally did decide to, of course, we should hire her, it was a former player who had played for the team that she was assistant GMing, you know, 20 years ago. So it's not exactly a complete triumph of, you know, opening the doors to non-traditional backgrounds in baseball. So felt it was important to point that out. And as you said, yeah, I mean, you know, there are assistant GMs, of course, who never go on to be

GMs. It's not a guarantee that you will be a GM, but there are many assistant GMs who get bumped up to GM within a few years and not decades and decades as it was in Kim Ang's case. And actually, another thing that Joe pointed out that I hadn't even really considered is that another way in which Kim Ang's hiring is somewhat unusual in this time is her age, right? I mean, she is 51 or 52 as of Tuesday. Happy birthday, Kim. And that's because she has been working in these high-level positions in baseball for so long. And lately, it seems like to be a GM, you almost have to be like a 33-year-old or someone who, you know, that's kind of what teams are hiring these days. old or someone who, you know, that's kind of what teams are hiring these days. I think Joe mentioned that Al Avila was the last GM to be hired of this age or really even close to this age. You know,

Mike Rizzo was 48 when he took over the Nationals in 2009. Avila was 57 when Dave dave dobrowski left the tigers in 2015 but that's pretty rare too just because uh teams are increasingly just recruiting the same sort of person with the same background and often that person is uh very young so it's just a reflection of the fact that it took this long because kim ang could have been hired as that 20 or 30 something year old person with those qualifications decades ago it just didn't happen in her case yeah I think that you know the gap between when she was first named an assistant GM to when she was hired to be a GM and granted like there were there were some detours to the league office in between, but that would be very unusual today to see that kind of a gap. If you're that young and you're so promising and you get hired into that role and named to that role to then be an AGM for so long, I don't know that that would happen.

So, yeah. Yeah. I have a follow-up to a topic we talked about last Friday, the unwritten rules controversy in NPB with pitcher Kyoji Fuj last inning, it's expected that a pitcher will just lay in a meatball for the batter to hit. And the other way, if it's a pitcher who is on the way out, then the batter is supposed to strike out intentionally. Someone in our Facebook group raised the scenario of what if a retiring great pitcher is facing a retiring great hitter? Then what do they do? Do they just both lay down their bat and their ball or do they actually go at it with full effort? I don't know what would happen in that scenario. But in this case, Fujikawa was facing his last batter, Shinosuke Shigenobu, and Shigenobu, unlike the two hitters who preceded him, had the audacity to swing and put the ball in play.

And so a fly out was the last out of Fujikawa's last game. And there was some tweeted about this controversy. And Wataru translates the tweet as, it seems my last matchup attracted some controversy, but I really don't think it's worthy of discussion. I tend to think nothing is born out of traditional fixed ideas. I tend to think nothing is born out of traditional fixed ideas. So, yeah, it's a nice sentiment, I think. Fujikawa is saying, don't make a big deal out of this. This is not an issue for him.

So that's nice. And Wataru also sent us a link to an article which he translated for us. And part of the controversy here was that the color man on the broadcast, a broadcaster named Kakefu, he seemed to imply that Shigenobu had broken the unwritten rule. And he clarified his remark here. I'm reading Wataru's translation. He said, when I said Shigenobu doesn't know, which is what he said on the broadcast, I didn't mean he should have struck out. I saw that Fujikawa was challenging him with all fastballs during the at-bat. I just wanted Shigenobu to understand and accept the passion he was trying to convey in every pitch. Although the pennant race had already been decided

for the Giants, it was also going to be an important at-bat for Shigenobu too, something that would be a highlight in his young career, hitting against a legend in his last at-bat before his retirement. I wanted him to accept Fujikawa's challenge and make a full swing at his fastball. Instead, it looked to me that he just made a half-baked swing, almost like a check swing. So he is saying that he was attempting to criticize him, not necessarily for not intentionally missing, but for not making a full effort. Like, I guess it looked to him like he was in between somewhere where he was not whiffing intentionally, but he was also not trying to swing as hard as he could and hit the ball hard. So I don't know if that's

the case, but evidently that's what he was trying to say. And that's what started some of this controversy. And when he was informed about Fujikawa's tweet, he said, I'm of the same opinion as him. Let's end this discussion here. So really his issue was with his performance as a thespian. Yes, I guess so. He just wanted him to sell it a little bit better. Well, that's fine. I think that that's ideally what you want in that moment is to lend the impression, real or imagined, that

the batter has been had and it is a triumphant final performance. Right. And if that is going to be in the hands of the batter in a more active and intentional way than we would typically see in a nat bat, they have to put on a good show. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, they gotta put on a good show. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, they said they're happy to end the discussion here.

So I guess we will end that discussion here too. Last thing, just wanted to mention two quick Scott Boris quotes that people have been emailing to us and tweeting at us pretty consistently that we have not discussed so far. Not that much to say about these, I don't think, but just in the interest of completeness. Last month, Tyler Kepner wrote an article for the Times about the possibility of neutral site World Series becoming a permanent thing. And he writes here, Boris, the most prominent agent in baseball, has called for a neutral site World Series for at least a decade. Once making the proposal in a letter to Bud Selig, the former commissioner,

Selig replied politely, Boris said, but the idea went nowhere. Quote, of course, the big bugaboo was that it means so much to the local entities to have the World Series in their town, Boris said in an interview on Monday. And I said, yeah, but the detriment it's causing the game, it's like serving soup in your hand. I get that it's soup, but your product is going to waste by doing it. And someone asked us if this was a nautical metaphor. I would not say so.

It's liquid, but I would not say it's nautical. Yeah, right. So I get what he's saying here, though. This is, to me, this is one of the more comprehensible similes that he has made here. Serving soup in your hand, it's still soup, but your product goes to waste. It slips through your fingers. You can't enjoy it the same way. Also, like, is it gazpacho?

Because you would just burn yourself very badly. Yeah, I don't know what sort of soup. You'd be like, hey hey here's my soup hands i don't think that i think in a situation where you are not consuming a chilled soup you stop thinking about the product as anything other than your enemy almost immediately because your hands have been scalded you are perhaps forever altered your relationship with soup is changed fundamentally yeah so but like what does that have to do with it was it necessary no i don't know about you man but i think that one of the best parts of the world series is that it is not neutral sites because you still have you know you

still have some corporate presence there but it's not like the super bowl where most of the people who go aren't fans of the teams that are playing right it's like it's in their it's in their home place and you get to have you know uh you get to have all the weird peculiarities of your ballpark come into play quite literally uh it's very nice can you express that sentiment in terms of soup is it like serving soup some other way i don't it's like serving soup in your favorite bowl yeah where it comes to occupy its typical nooks and crannies i don't know this breaks down very maybe it's like eating soup in the comfort of your dining room or your living room or something as opposed to eating soup in an airport or somewhere you're just passing through. I don't know.

I think part of the problem here is that soup is about comfort and calm. and calm, often in the face of a cold and blustery winter's day. That is not the kind of meal I would associate with the World Series if for no other reason than it seems very perilous to eat soup at the World Series, whether it's in your hands or not. Yeah. I love soup. Soup's my favorite, maybe. But I have never eaten it in my hand, and I understand why Scott Boris is saying that one shouldn't do that. I applaud Tyler Kepner for his transition from this quote, because if you're a writer,

how do you pivot from Scott Boris comparing the World Series to serving soup in your hand? How do you even join that to the next paragraph? Well, Tyler found a way. He said, soup belongs in a bowl as it happens. And in Boris's vision, the Super Bowl should be a model for Major League Baseball. It's a little strange, but what are you going to do? I kind of applaud the effort there. I have no comments, sir. Okay.

The more recent quote is courtesy of of mike puma who writes about the mets for the new york post this one is a tweet from last week and mike puma said no gm meetings this year so we had to reach out directly to scott boris to find out in which supermarket aisle the mets are shopping did you i don't know that you had to, but they did. And Puma's tweet says, said Boris, quote, there is a new apple in New York, Met Delicious, a Cohen Core with a Wall Street flavor. First of all, I guess of all the flavors on the table

based on the Cohen Core and the Wall Street flavor, I guess you want a Wall Street flavor. It does not answer the question, except I suppose to say the produce aisle. They'll be shopping there. He just needs a writer. Either that or a different writer. Yeah, he needs a staff i i mean wouldn't you rather just what he should have done what he should have done was made it about the kind of grocery store right like they're shopping at whole foods as opposed to shopping at grocery outlet or something that

would have been awful and mean but also drive home the point that they probably are going to spend some money in free agency and thus will be shopping at the top of the market. I don't know, man. Yeah. Sandy Alderson said that he would be shopping for meat and potatoes as well as in the gourmet section of the supermarket. And he said he's got to find out where the gourmet section is located because he hasn't had an opportunity to shop there before. So I guess he was getting in the supermarket food based language also. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know that this was entirely necessary or clarifying for me.

But I think the answer, Ben, is that we're, you know, we're all stuck at home. So what else are you going to do but make some phone calls to Scott Boris? Yeah, and Boris did in some past years say that the Mets were shopping in the freezer section because they had a budget. And then Alderson, who I think was the GM then, said that freezer burn was something he was familiar with. That was his comeback. I don't know i think that we're we're learning that like none of these people have gone grocery shopping for themselves in at least 15 years yeah apparently two years later i'm reading from puma's article here

alderson was less amused two years later when boris said the mets were shopping in the fruits and nuts aisle alderson retorted boris shops near the meat section that is where he gets his bullshit okay again that's a good one i think that's pretty good except that they don't sell oh my stars well they don't sell bullshit for consumption no no no none of these people know how much a gallon of milk costs. I enjoyed the Twitter exchange. Puma tweeted this, and then someone tweeted at him, there is no way Scott Boris said that. Oh.

Someone who is not familiar with Scott Boris and his manner of speaking. And Puma said, you really think somebody would invent that quote? And then the guy said, I'm just saying, sounds like Scotty is on something making that comment and then someone else chimes in i think he hired a writer for some of those quotes and then someone else says why wouldn't he say that the new apple is ripe for his taking then someone else says just a super weird thing to say and then a final person says have you ever heard boris talk that dude got his own vocabulary. So just, yeah, I enjoyed that exchange at least.

I think it's nice that in 2020, when so much is disappointing, that there are people who get to experience Boris for the first time. They have this wonderful novel experience of his use of language and metaphor. And this is a year when so much of our lives is defined by its sameness. And so I'm frankly jealous of those people. It's like getting to watch The Godfather for the first time all over again. You'll never replicate that experience. Yeah, you're right. All right. Well, let's take a quick break and we'll be back with Patrick Dubuque and Dan Siborski to talk about sacred metrics, good or bad. How will they identify us?

Who will remember for what we've done? All right, so we are joined now by Patrick Dubuque, author and editor at Baseball Prospectus, who last week wrote an article entitled How the Game Was Solved and Where It Got Us. Hello, Patrick. Hi. We are also joined by Dan Zimborski of Fangraphs and of the Zips Projection System, who has spent most of his life embedded in the sabermetric community in one way or another. Hello, Dan. Hello. So, Patrick, would you care to lay out your thesis or theses, or if you didn't necessarily come to a conclusion, I guess the topic that you were interested in exploring in this column.

Yeah, the piece covers a lot of ground. It does. Metaphorically and literally. Yeah. So basically, what I was trying to get about in the essay is actually, funnily enough, related to the last time I was on the show two years ago, which was when we talked about player salaries and whether we should talk about them. And at the time, I was like, eh, I don't think we should. But I don't feel comfortable saying we should never

analyze transactions. And now I'm here to say, yes, we should not have analyzed transactions. We should have just stopped. And the idea being that we are kind of at a changing of the guard or an era of baseball where the old standby of dollars per war no longer really works. And it's because the idea of a market and what a reasonable

value is for a given player just don't track on the same way that we've been used to thinking of them since 2001. And does it go beyond that in the sense that you were kind of reckoning or wrestling with whether cybermetrics has had, I guess, a net positive or negative effect on the sport in terms of not just compensation in the market, but also, I guess, the brand of baseball that is played? Did you kind of want to sum up all of those things in this piece to some extent? So actually, you know, you asked the question of whether it's good or bad, and I don't think it's really either one. I didn't use it in the article, and I wish I had because I thought of it, of course, afterwards. But really, what I would describe analytics as is the

industrialization of baseball and baseball thought. We basically developed all of these new tools to how we think about the game and how the game should be played. And those tools brought us both refrigerators and robber barons in the sense that they've been wielded for creating both better play and not necessarily better play for literally everyone in the game. And what we, I think the problem now is that we've reached a point where the first stage of analytics and the mostly appreciable noticeable things that everybody can get behind on base percentage,

the things that can be seen and calculated, enjoyed have mostly been mined. And now we've reached into a stage where we have still, there are still plenty of developments to be made and plenty of things to be learned, but they're not as easy to see or enjoy. You have your metrics, your mixed methodology, like DRA and DRC, where we can get more exact and we can get more precise about our evaluation, but you have to trust the scientists on it because they're using giant computers to calculate it. And then you have StatCast and that stuff where you see a home run and then some numbers appear on the screen afterwards to tell you what the home run was like.

But those are also calculated by computers. So you have all these things that are still being developed. But as far as actually enjoying the game as it is being presented to us, I'm not sure that what we're learning now is making the game more enjoyable as much as it's making it more efficient. Dan, I mean, you go back to rec sport baseball when you were a teenager, I guess, probably right in the mid 90s or so. So you solved or has been solved and how much more solving actually remains to be done. And then any thoughts you might have about how some of the things that were being discussed on Rexport Baseball back in the mid-90s that are just orthodoxy now but were outsiders on the fringe then have changed the game either for the better or for the worse. Well, back in the rec sport dot baseball days, we didn't really have to tackle some of the larger questions. Patrick is correct that the low hanging fruit of analytics has largely been solved because back then as outsiders who never really expected to win or be part of the baseball

establishment or have any influence over things that happen in baseball. We didn't have to address these things. At the time, we just were curious about baseball and answering just basic questions about how runs are scored, how games are won. Because really, still in the mid-90s, despite the work of Bill James and Pete Palmer and John Thorne, there was still in the larger public a kind of despite the work of, you know, Bill James and Pete Palmer and John Thorne, there was still in the larger public a kind of, I don't want to say ignorance, because there's a

bit of arrogance to use that word, but it just, it wasn't really addressed in a large-scale way that hit mass media. Even Bill James hadn't worked for a team except for, you know, arbitration consulting and things like that. So, you know, now we're going on 25 years later and it's different. There's different questions we have to approach. We never really had to think about the aesthetics or the social desirability of different things in baseball or just what makes the game grow to fans. It's something that we do have to address, but it's something that I don't have the same experience with as

someone who's, say, graduated from college in the last few years. I guess part of why I find this conundrum to be challenging from a philosophical perspective, but also from an editorial perspective is, and Patrick, I would be curious kind of, and Dan too, like what your answer to this is, is sort of optimizing and improving the experience of watching baseball for whom, right? Like we've had this shift in front offices where the outside perspective is now orthodoxy in terms of how you run a modern baseball organization. And there's some variation at the margins in terms of how sophisticated teams are around that. But in general, they are, you know, light years better than they were on average, you know, 15, 20 years ago. And so you have that push for optimization. And the counter that is often presented to that is this older school, let's bunt, you know, we all have this impression

of smolts on the postseason broadcast, seemingly hating the modern version of baseball. And the fact of the matter is that there's many different ways to enjoy and sort of experience baseball as there are forms of baseball. experience of the game even now when you look at people who read fan graphs and baseball prospectus they probably occupy one end of the spectrum but there are plenty of people who still haven't gotten on like they don't know what ops is right they don't they don't know what drc plus or wrc plus is the concept of war is still kind of slippery and amorphous so maybe one way we can kind of talk about how things have changed and also how we might course correct the parts of the games the game that we don't like is to say, like, who are we trying to improve the experience for? Like, what is the unit that we're measuring there? Well, I think, first of all, I have my own opinions about the aesthetics of baseball and how I'd love to see baseball change from my viewing experience.

I'm sure everyone's fascinated about it. my viewing experience. I'm sure everyone's fascinated about it. But I think that more than anything, when the people who mourn the loss of the old school style of the game, when Sabermetric started, and it was about how bunting was bad because it didn't help you win, and they were absolutely correct about that fact. And while there are still times that bunting is good, and we still have to use the disclaimer that, you know, you can't actually try and bunt for hits sometimes. It's fine. That was the rallying cry was that, you know, kill the sacrifice bunt. Why are we doing this thing that's always worth negative 0.02 wins per?

And that's fine. of the button, that there is more than one way to win, and that there is more than one optimal way to build a team. And I think that's what's missing is that we're finding it, everybody is starting to build more and more of the same team because there is a smart way to do it. And that a lot of these old ways weren't smart. And we're kind of narrowing down the path of aesthetically what you should do. And that's a shame because we could control that if we wanted to. The game doesn't have to be the way it is just because that's the best way to solve this particular game. Yeah, I do think that bunting, sacrifice bunting, at least in isolation, is pretty boring. Actually, I don't miss sacrifice bunting, but I guess I agree that variety is good.

And so having it maybe is better in some way than not having it. Like the actual act of it, bunting for a hit, drag bunting, whatever, that's really fun. Sacrifice bunting, if you're just, you know just laying your bat out there and there's no suspense about whether you're bunting or not, and it's just, are you going to get it down or not? I find that to be, if anything, less entertaining than just taking a hack, even if that hack might very often end in a whiff. I just think the play itself, if you're just giving up the out, I don't find it to be that exciting. But I think there's something to be said for just not having the same swing and the same play every single time. So I'm with you on that.

Dan, do you think that there was sort of either a pro player or pro ownership slant to early Sabermetrics because that's something you hear now i think that maybe if only unwittingly unintentionally it sort of played into looking at things from ownership's perspective or from the gm's perspective personally i don't get the sense that that was the intent you know or that like early sabermetrics people were saying that, you know, players were overpaid in the aggregate or, you know, that they're all spoiled or something the way that you hear old school columnists say sometimes. But I suppose in the sense that people were trying to figure out what is actually valuable and is this person worth it, quote unquote, based on his on-field production. worth it, quote unquote, based on his on-field production. I guess it did certainly lead a generation of people to look at things from the GM's perspective. And I guess in that sense, if you are within a market where there are actual spending constraints, and it's not really clear that there are now, or at least that there were pre-pandemic. Things are a little bit different currently, maybe. But

I guess it perhaps encouraged people to look at things from that side of the game. I just don't know whether that was actually the intent or whether it's fair to hold people responsible for not foreseeing, I guess, the next couple of decades of baseball development. One of the things you'd actually find about many people in the early sabermetric community is we did tend to be very pro player. In large part, we didn't expect, you know, some of these tools to necessarily hurt players because nobody really expected that a lot of this would actually be used in any way. I know a lot of the early Usenet fighting was about the strike and it was mostly the Sabre people taking the side of the players and the more casual fans and AOL users and Web TV users.

I hate to be a little biased there, but they tended to be more pro owner. I think there's a natural pro owner bias in sports because fans are interacting with the team on the field. They're not reacting and interacting with how a player uses their money. When the Baltimore Orioles win games, people following the Orioles, that means something to them. How, say, John Means spends his salary, even if on a general level you want to see him get more of what he's earned as a player on the field, people don't really interact with that. So you're always going to

have, no matter how well-intentioned you go into it, there will kind of be a pro-team construction bias, so to speak. Yeah. And you just know what the players are making and you know what their salaries are. And with the owners, you might not know, even though they're worth far more. It's just maybe a little less visible because you can't see the books. Ben, you used a word there earlier, and I think it's a really important one, and that's the word suspense. The suspense of knowing what's going to happen in a sport is why people watch it, right? You watch basketball and you watch the shot as it goes in,

and there's this sense of dramatic irony of whether it's going to go in or not, how much you know about what it's likely to or not, the pass down field to the wide receiver who looks open. And in baseball, we don't have that as much because everything's so fast. We know what the pitcher plans to do or what the odds are that he might do. The hitter mostly reacts. And one of the things, when you say that, yeah, it's boring to have somebody who bunts all the time.

And when the sacrifice bunt was automatic, yes, it is boring. It's boring when they automatically take hacks too. The idea is that it's interesting when there's an unknown quantity to it, when you're trying to decide what their strategy is. And I think that's true of the game itself, but it's also very true when talking about what's going on with the sport outside as well. And as Dan mentioned earlier, they didn't think in terms of pro player or pro owner. And I think that's partially because they didn't have to as much back then, because I think everybody's interests were far more aligned in the early days. The owners, the players, and the fans all wanted the same thing, which was to win championships. And all

of them were rewarded for doing so. Baseball is wonderful because there's not really a terrible element of selfishness when it comes to player production. If you play well, the team plays well. It's not like basketball where you can hog the ball, inflate your own stats. If you're inflating your own stats in baseball, you are good, and you are morally good because you're helping your teammates win. At some point, and it happens to co-align with some of the more advanced applications of analytics, that harmony of interests divided, and suddenly not all parties were as interested as winning

as they were before. And I think that's where we get into trouble. So I guess then the question becomes, what is our new... There's the aesthetic question of what we want to prioritize within the game, which I think we all would agree, regardless of the exact form it takes on the field, that some diversity is more engaging and a more engaging lens through which to watch the game. So diversity of the kinds of players, diversity of strategy, you know, we want to retain our capacity to be surprised by baseball. So there's that aesthetic consideration. want to retain our capacity to be surprised by baseball. So there's that aesthetic consideration. And then there's the concern that all of the people on this podcast have, which is how we talk about baseball. And we already have decided we're going to talk about it through an advanced statistics lens at Fangraphs and BP, right? That's going to be the way that we

understand who is good and who is not. But we also now have to talk about how to make those things interact with the social discourse that has arisen around the game as what was outside, as Dan mentioned, and didn't really have an expectation of coming into front offices became orthodoxy. And so I guess, Patrick, let's start with you. How do you envision us having conversations about baseball as publications that have to cover the sport? So you don't want us to talk about player contracts, and I think we can touch on that more if you'd like, but what is the shape of the discourse look like to you and how should it be constituted now? Because we're at a point where we do know that advanced stats have labor implications, right? That there are going to be consequences to players when we see teams optimized, that there are going to be consequences for players and fans when profit is increasingly decoupled from winning. So how do we talk about baseball now? Well, I think we should couple winning back with performance. That would be nice because then it

wouldn't be nearly as hard because then we could talk about people being good and then they would be compensated fairly for the qualities that they bring. We wouldn't have to try and worry about whether us talking about the subject changed the subject. I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to do that in sports. I don't know how to do that with capitalism in general. But we do have this situation where as long as the teams don't need to win to make money anymore, we're going to have a conflict that is going to be almost impossible to ground everywhere else. As far as not talking about player salaries, at this point, we just had Drew Smiley signed for one year and $11 million, which I had not checked Drew Smiley September of 2020. And so I assumed there was a typo in that number. I thought it was 1.1.

No, he's quite good now. And that is great for Drew Smiley and possibly great for the game. It doesn't make me think that everything's fine now, given what happened to Colton Wong and what happened to Brad Hand and what's going to happen to about, you know, hundreds of other players who are entering ARB3 in the next month or two. But I think what starts with us understanding and recognizing that the current system for paying baseball players is fundamentally unfair and that we have a system where until you reach free agency, you are paid for what you've done. And then once you've reached free agency, you are paid for what you're going to do exactly when it's the worst case scenario for both sides of that tipping point. the worst case scenario for both sides of that tipping point. Dan, you want to weigh in on any of that or how you handle it when you write about projections-based articles?

Yeah, it's especially tricky for me because essentially more than probably the majority of baseball writers, the work I do is based on kind of this cold hard analysis. So sometimes I could get too into that and too, I don't want to say amoral, but maybe I'm the Jay Gould of sabermetrics or something. I think that largely you need to see baseball structures change to incentivize what we want to see.

Right now, the revenue sharing system in baseball, revenue is shared. It incentivizes essentially having low revenues. It doesn't incentivize winning. I don't know how the MLB and MLBPA get to the point where they pass something like this. But I've for a long time, I've been in favor of a system in which teams are essentially get larger parts of the revenue sharing pool based on market and how many games they win over a certain amount because if you want to to make wins something that teams will properly you know invest money and reward their players for you have to incentivize that in the

revenue system and there's no way you can change analysis to change that the the the incentives have to match what the desired result you want uh now you also want to at the same time make it so that players are get better compensated at the time they're actually you know earning the money because i don't think it's healthy to have a system in which the pie is continually grown by, I hate to use the term in this conversation, but bad contracts. I think it looks really just bad for baseball when someone like Ronald Acuna Jr. is underpaid for a decade and his treasure at the end of the rainbow is that you'll be overpaid later.

It just seems kind of perverse in a way. And when we could directly pay people for what they do and what they contribute. Yeah. There's a lot of, I guess, sort of self-flagellation in the sabermetric community about all of this. And, you know, maybe some of it justified. defending your life or encounter at far point sort of scenario where we're like, you know, defending sabermetrics and, you know, some all-knowing being is saying, look what you've done. You've ruined the sport. And I think there are aspects of that that are true, whether it's the ascendance of the three true outcomes or the decrease in base stealing or bullpenning,

which we've talked about many times, the demise of the starting pitcher and the pitcher's duel. There's part of it, though, that I think just some of the appeal of the sport to me is, I guess, the idea. I mean, it's such a cliche now. I hate to say it, but, you know, the inefficiency, right? The thing that nobody realizes that is actually more valuable than anyone knows. And that's what really got me into all of this. It didn't get me into baseball. I was a baseball fan before I had any idea that sabermetrics existed.

But I think what really launched me into doing this professionally is reading things like baseball between the numbers and seeing, wow, there's a lot here that I didn't know. And look at this. This is actually what is valuable. It's more valuable than that. And at the time, I mean, as you said, Dan, like no one was really listening. And so it wasn't as if anyone was fretting about, boy, what will happen if every team in baseball suddenly accepts all of this and all the people who are writing for this book get to go work for front offices and do all this stuff that just seems so remote that it wasn't really even a consideration and it changed very quickly but i guess there is something appealing about that to me the idea that there might be some hidden value here you know catcher framing was really intoxicating, I think, when we all learned just how valuable it was. And maybe if the sport is solved more so than it used to be, we just won't get that anymore. And maybe that's okay. Maybe that was a harmful thing all along or that we focused too much on being smarter or knowing something that no one else knew. But I guess if I'm being

honest, I have to admit that that was something that was really pretty compelling to me when I was reading all these things about this sport that I had been watching and didn't even know. And there was just this hidden layer to it all that was there all the time. And I think when people criticize sabermetricians and say, you know, get your nose out of the spreadsheet or whatever, they don't love the sport, they just love the numbers. I think that was always wrong and that they loved the sport so much that they wanted to understand how it was functioning in a deeper way. And that led to a lot of these explorations. But I wonder if it was kind of inevitable that ultimately it

would lead to this sort of streamlining where everyone's doing the same thing. And I don't know if that is inevitable, whether if you have sabermetrics and everyone's on board and we're all reading the same studies and doing the same research, then ultimately you'll get every team constructed the same way and every player trying to do the same thing. Like, we definitely have more of that in the game now, but is the fact that it's so three true outcomes heavy, is that Sabermetric's fault or is it partly just that players are so big and so strong and they throw so hard and they hit the ball so hard and the ball is super lively now, so of course you want to swing for the fences?

the ball so hard and the ball is super lively now. So of course you want to swing for the fences. Like it seems to me that a lot of that diversity in playing approach that we want could be brought back with rules changes or equipment changes. And MLB just has not been very proactive or even reactive when it comes to a lot of that stuff. Ben, I think I want to go actually go back on your point here to a word that Patrick used in his article that we've been talking about, the word metagame. It's a super important word in this context. At the risk of some eyes glazing over, I want to get into esports for a second because it does teach us something here. In esports, in competitive games, whether they're shooters or card games or MOBAs, the word metagame is a huge thing. And a lot of the competitive play in these games revolves around the metagame and solving the metagame. Now, in a computer game, they have the ability to tinker very aggressively and in finite amounts. So you'll see

when companies with games that are played competitively, they'll adjust someone's healing rate by 1% or adjust the value of a card so it costs one more mana point to use. These kinds of tinkerings are crucial to keeping the game competitive. And people who play these games are also very competitive about solving the metagame, so to speak. You have entire websites of people parsing data from these games, analyzing which hero in League of Legends is 2% more damage per second than someone else. And companies having to stay one step ahead of them to correct the game and to keep it balanced. As you say, baseball doesn't really do that. Baseball's one, like, metagame adjustment tool,

the easiest one is the ball itself, and they've kind of approached this by having a ball of mysterious character and mysterious construction in as completely non-transparent a way as possible uh while baseball does have the power to do things there are ways to deaden the ball there are ways to incentivize different styles of play to create a new metagame to be solved uh i'm not necessarily saying it's the right choice, but take the bases. They're 90 feet apart. What if they were 85 feet apart? What if we do things that increase the value of balls in play

relative to a home run? Again, I'm not saying we should necessarily do that, but these are the kinds of things that baseball has the power to do to keep the game interesting and active and to address where it might be competitively non-compelling and i don't think baseball leadership is very progressive in this manner and i think that's a shame because i think that you could create new fans because at the heart of baseball the fans you want to bring in are fans who are interested in the game and in the competitive environment. And those are the people who are going to keep watching baseball, not for spectacle, not for some team has a chance to be the number eight seed in the NL in a season, for good baseball and games that mean things. Yeah. And to piggyback on your esports point, because this is something I wrote about a couple of years ago, but sometimes the meta will change

in some way that makes the game more entertaining and then that will be solved or standardized and then that will be the new boring. But, you know, it was kind of constructed around these slow moving heroes who could absorb a lot of damage and it worked, but it wasn't all that visually interesting and there wasn't that much diversity. And so the way to counter that was this strategy called dive comp, which was based around, you know, loading up on these fast moving heroes who could kind of blitz the weak isolated opponents while the tanks were elsewhere. who could kind of blitz the weak, isolated opponents while the tanks were elsewhere. And so you would just sort of dive behind enemy lines and go from one opponent to the next. And then that became so dominant that everyone was doing that, and everyone got bored with that. So that can happen too. So if they were to change something in baseball that kind of worked against the current metagame, and then there might be a new metagame and people might solve it, but that might take a while.

And you could just kind of keep doing that and keep things fresh and interesting. So as you said, it's a little harder in baseball where you just can't, you know, tweak something very easily with a slider in some menu somewhere and put out the patch notes that say that, you know, this guy is now buffed or nerfed a say that, you know, this guy is now buffed or nerfed a little bit, you know, stronger or weaker than before. It's harder with humans and actual physical objects, but you could still try, you know, you could still do a little bit of that. And really for decades now, MLB just hasn't intervened all that much. So baseball

may be solved right now, And maybe that's sort of sabermetrics fault in a sense, but it wouldn't be that hard to say, okay, well, this thing that worked when baseball was like this now no longer works so well. So now you have to adjust and find some new way to do it. I swear I'm not intervening just because as soon as we transition heavily into esports, I rapidly lose any relevance in this conversation. But I guess that brings us back to the point, though, of who gets to decide that, right? Who's dictating the state of the metagame?

Because right now it's MLB and they're largely not acting, right? I mean, Manfred comes out with his trial balloons every offseason that he's going to ban the shift and make everyone 20 feet taller and move the bases back and forth and here and there. But the general state has been one of relative consistency. And we could tinker with the rules or we could tinker with the ball. And we could do both of those things in a way that incentivize or disincentivize a particular build and form of baseball player. But i guess that this keeps bringing us back to if we want to change the meta game again to reintroduce dynamism into baseball who is the who is the the shadowy cabal

that is making that decision and what kind of consensus do we think is important to emerge around that because the four people on this podcast are going to have a really different answer to that question than like my grandpa, who like tries really hard to understand what my job is, but doesn't really, you know. So who are we? Who are we bringing to the table? And what kind of consensus do we think we need around that question before we go do? Well, bringing this back to the article, one of the things that came up in using the metaphor of moving west, and did we explain the article? Anyway, it was about moving west.

It was about the West as a frontier and basically how America had this open area to just kind of funnel all of its energy and also its problem makers. And therefore, we could always have this release valve on any kind of tension that wasn't involving slavery until we ran out of it. And then once we ran out of it, then we had to start looking elsewhere and starting to take over islands that didn't really belong to the country. And so in the same way, we have this thing with baseball and pretty much the same kind of situation. And in the West, you have two forces and you have the invisible hand, you have productivity,

you have the analytics, which is essentially your industrialization, trying to exploit these resources. And then you had suddenly, once you ran out of land, you had a government that needed to put the brakes on it. And to say, actually, for the sake of the public good, we should probably hang on to some of these trees, just a few somewhere. And so suddenly, you had this whole American notion of individualism and everybody just getting and making is doing and taking as much as they can, with the idea that you have to share some of it at some point. And so, yeah, the answer to your question, Meg, the answer is unfortunately wrong, Manfred. Like,

we need a government within baseball that will look after the public good, the shared good of all of us, because 30 owners are going to look after 30 owners and the players are obviously going to look after the players. They have to. That's part of the system. So we need someone that's above the system to fix the system to make sure that the players and the owners and the fans are all getting what they need out of the situation.

We're in real trouble then, Patrick. One could argue that that trouble doesn't stop at baseball. We need to buy a team because I don't have quite enough. We'll all have to go in, I think. We need many more Fangrass memberships to be purchased for that to be feasible, I mean, I think there is something somewhat noble about sabermetrics in a sense, whether or not it's had overall positive or negative effects. I think it's nice that sabermetrics is devoted to sort of finding out the truth about things. That's something that appeals to me about it is that it's always just been about trying to do science, basically, but with baseball, but with sports. And I like science, and I like baseball, and I like that

you can blend both of those things. And I guess some of these dangers come about when it's applied, when it's not just being studied on Usenet or RecSport Baseball or in an academic sense, but it's being studied and then these lessons are being applied in front offices. But I guess I wouldn't want to just rewind some if I could just flash the neuralyzer and make us forget the last 30 years of sabermetric knowledge and go back to a time when people even more so than now could just you know assert things without any evidence about baseball and baseball players and believe things that just are demonstrably untrue i guess it's less harmful in a baseball context than it is in many other contexts but i think there's still something nice about that. It's like,

hey, let's figure out how this game works and let's try to be open about it and show our work and figure out what we're watching here instead of just kind of making baseless, unsupported statements. Not that those have gone away either entirely, but it's harder to do that now, I think, when you're sort of expected to bring evidence. And I guess that's not great if it just leads to baseball being uniform and the same. But I think there is something nice about what people set out to do eventually. It would not be the first time that people with good intentions had something backfire on them. But I am sympathetic, I guess, with the people back in the 90s, way back when, who were trying to figure out, no, let's see what is actually valuable in baseball. Let's not just

say based on experience or authority or whatever our gut feeling is. I mean, the robber barons are bad, but the fridges are very, very good. I'm very glad I have a fridge and I don't want to, I don't want to undo industrialization. I just think that, you know, using it correctly is the way to go. And, you know, I don't think we can blame analytics or baseball for the problems of, you know, the greatest problem of, you know, human philosophy. Yeah, honestly, you know, to answer the question from the beginning, is analytics good for the game? I think it's very good for the game. And the way that you described it, Ben, and all of

the joy that you took out of that approach towards the game is good. It's good. You liked it. It doesn't hurt anybody. The fun is in the finding. And that's why I love baseball too. It is a puzzle and the metagame is pleasurable to go through. And there's nothing wrong with that. And that's why I do think we should make the game more random. We should make it harder. It's not that analytics is bad. We should just give it more of a challenge. There's a chess equivalent, you know, being the original eSport. And when people were growing tired of chess being as solved as it was, especially when computers showed up, one of the proposals was by Bobby Fisher. And his proposal was a thing called Fisher Random. And essentially, what it was, is that it was just normal chess, except before the

game started, all of the pieces on the back row were randomized. And you didn't know what it was going to be until you sat down at the table and you had to deal with the fact that your king, your queen was in the corner, and your knights were both in the center, or your bishops were both on the same color. And you just kind of rolled with it. And I find that really appealing. The idea that not only should we change the game, should we change the metagame, but we should do it constantly and randomly. And the fun will be in watching everyone react. And then we get to react along with it. We get to experience that shared joy of solving the puzzle again each time. We get new seasons, but we still have the same baseball every single year. And it'll

be fun to have a new baseball every year. Can you relate this to the Sicilian defense for those of us who have just been binging the Queen's Gambit? And that's what we know about chess now. I haven't watched that. Do they use the Nostorf defense? Because that's the variation. That's the one I hate the most.

Well, the thing about the Sicilian defense is that it does create interesting tactical scenarios where you don't get with like a standard, you know, Queen's Gambit decline. All right. You did it. It is the fun way to play as Black. I admit. I do play it.

I asked you to relate it to the Sicilian defense and you did it. Thank you very much, Dan. All right. Well, does either of you have any closing statements here? I guess either in defense of sabermetrics or condemnation of it. I think for me, I do want to see, you know, new questions to be answered. And that's one of the nice things about doing projections and doing a lot of research there is that projections and how the future happens, that itself hasn't really been solved at all. So it does keep me guessing.

And I think that without that kind of exploration, I would be bored. I mean, I'd probably still do an okay job at my job, but I'd be more bored at it. But I do hope that MLB can adopt a more aggressive approach at these things. I think that while baseball's past is one of its greatest strengths, it's sometimes, as we see here, one of its greatest weaknesses. I don't think that just because the game was played exactly a certain way in 1940 is how we should necessarily play it in 2040. So I guess we'll see, and we'll all continue, I'm pretty sure,

to try to advocate for our positions as best we can. And I just hope that baseball's power makers actually listen. We'll see. I think the key for me is that what's important for a baseball season is that you feel like there is a chance. And there have been several areas in baseball's history where the majority of fans know that their team doesn't have a chance. It used to be that most, you know, half the teams were glorified farm systems selling players to the Yankees so they could stay alive. And now we have a different thing where half the team's leagues know that they don't have a chance. And so enter into their phase of non-competition and sell off Mookie bats. And those, I think that's the real problem is knowing too much about the future that there's

no excitement, there's no suspense left. And that's what we've got to solve. And we can solve it multiple ways. Chaos is my preferred version. MLB's version is to make every team make the playoffs. I prefer mine. Me too. Yeah, it would have been very difficult to foresee the rise of MLB advanced media and the way that RSNs have exploded and TV contracts have gotten so huge and teams have developed real estate and all these things that have enabled them to make money without competing. That's almost, I mean, that's sort of separate from what anyone was talking about on Rexport Baseball or at Baseball Prospectus in

the 90s. I think things have evolved so much and in such unpredictable ways. And I think a lot of that, you know, the people writing in early Sabermetrics couldn't have seen that coming or, you know, wouldn't have been in favor of the way that things have evolved or the way that a lot of teams and owners operate now. But that is the reality. So we have to figure out some way past it and we all love the metagame i think we all love the game too i mean we like it in the old-fashioned you know crack of the bat green of the grass sense also it's just that we all got hooked also on this metagame aspect of it too and that will continue to fascinate me i think so i hope it can remain a source of some interest for all of us so and you know not everyone has to appreciate that aspect of

the game or care about that like sabermetrics i think has always been there for those who want it but if you don't want it that's okay i you know, in the media at least. But at this point, it's so deeply ingrained in the game itself and in the players and in the managers and general managers that there's just no avoiding it, even if you somehow want to. I think though, Ben, if there's one thing, and I think you're right that I would never hold any of the Sabre 1.0 folks responsible for failing to anticipate like how lucrative real estate developments around ballparks have been and how big a role that's going to play in teams' business strategies, because I think that's a little far afield. But I think if I could go back in time and have that

generation of writers do one thing, it would be Sam's advice from a few years ago, which is they should have had some philosophers on staff. Because I think that the particular contours of the dynamic between labor and ownership now and how analytics was going to play into that might have been difficult to anticipate. But I think I'm always struck by how little mapping of the realizations they were finding that generation of writer did onto an understanding of like power as a dynamic between, you know, capital and labor, because they just lived through a strike, like it was right there for them. And so I don't think the specifics are necessarily fair to peg any one person or generation of writers with. But I think

that if there had been a couple more philosophers floating around back then, someone might have said, excuse me, but this is always about power. And what is this tool going to be used for and who's going to wield it? So I don't want us to let everyone entirely off the hook because that's one of the privileges that comes uh from only starting to write for baseball prospectus in 2015 is you get to be like how did you not know better you rubes right yeah definitely the the language that was standard the sort of dehumanizing you know assets and just talking about uh overpaid or good contract or bad contract only from the perspective of the team.

I guess that tended to happen in those days because there were actual budgets and, you know, payrolls generally only went up to a certain point. And so if you devoted this percentage of your payroll to this unproductive player, then that might actually prevent you from going and getting a productive player. Whereas now it seems like it doesn't really that those things have been decoupled in a way that they weren't some decades ago. So you're right. I have one question for each of you that is only loosely related to what we have been talking about. Dan, you started

your Zips Projection Systems series last week, where you go team by team, and you did a little primer to kick it off about how you generate the projections. And this is something we had you on in April to talk about, just to ask how this pandemic shortened season and the canceled minor league season would affect the projections. Well, now you know, now you are generating the projections. So what's the effect? Yeah, this was the panicky part where I had to actually make a decision. I've spent a lot of the summer looking at 1981 to 1982, 1994 to 1995, because the problem is we don't have a lot of seasons like this in baseball.

And that's just talking about shortened seasons. I don't even know how to make an adjustment for there's a massive pandemic going around everyone. That's just going to be a source of error, I think, because I have nothing for that. But for shortened seasons from 81 and 94, I found an approach that works the best is to essentially do a rest of season projection as if the season continued. Use kind of that as a baseline. It's a completely unsatisfying thing to do, but it's the approach that at least from what we've had so far that has worked the best. I won't actually know what happens with this until, you know, the end of the 2021 season.

And hopefully I'm going to cross my fingers that it's knowledge that I'll never have to use again, because there's always going to be a part of me that loves to learn new things like this, because it's the situation's created new questions but you don't really like you know the the awful awful scenario that has resulted in these new questions that need to be answered so with a little bit of of worry i i'm stepping into 2021 uh hopefully we'll have a fairly normal season especially after a vaccine gets wider spread. But I do expect error bars to be happen to be larger than in most years with the projections, even though in the past I didn't find that 82 and 95 projections were actually less accurate, which surprises me and I still

can't explain. But at this point, I'm in the same bucket with a lot of other people. I have nothing to do except wait and see if my educated guess worked out. And another thing I was curious about this spring was what the season would mean for the Baseball Prospectus Annual and the need to fill it with player comments, because it's hard to write comments about players who had short seasons or no seasons at all. So Patrick, you are co-editing the upcoming annual with RJ Anderson and Craig Goldstein. How are you all handling this, both with domestic leagues and foreign leagues? Well, first of all, luckily, I can pass off the problems of Pocota to my enlightened colleagues. But as far as how we're handling it, we don't get to put the over 2,000 players blurb on the front

of the cover this year. We're trimming it back to about 50 players per team instead of the usual 65 to 70. And most of those players are the players in the lower minors. You've got their leave this year. And instead, we're focusing on players that are either played this year, which fortunately, most teams blessed us with cups of coffee for lots of people to get glimpses at and for the players who should be showing up next year. And then we took that space from the comments that we were taking off and divided it towards other things.

We're going to add some more essays this year, and also we've included essays and comments for the CPBL, the NPB, and the KBO, which I'm very excited about because I like those leagues a lot. And it should be very interesting to look at what, not only players that might be, you know, joining the MLB someday, but also just, you know, players who play a different type of baseball. And it's fun to look at glimpses of those leagues.

All right. Well, we wish you both the best of luck with your endeavors. You can read Patrick at Baseball Perspectus. You can go get your annual the pre-order page is already up with a listed shipping date of january 30th pretty soon something to look forward to i will include the link on the show page you can also read dan every week at fangraphs thank you very much to both of you guys thanks big thanks ben thanks for having me on always fun that'll do it for today.

Thanks, as always, for listening. If you're looking for something else to listen to, go check out the latest episode of Slate Sports Podcast Hang Up and Listen. You'll hear Meg talking about the hiring of Kim Ang. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up

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